OT: Apple's New xServe - 1U Rackmount Server

[Rob Brandt]

At 11:40 PM 5/15/02 -0400, you wrote:

>I've never understood why corporate America is reluctant to accept a 
>product just because it's free and open to inspection.  Does charging 
>money for a product make that product any more reliable?  And guess what, 
>engineers of the same caliber develop software for Open Source projects as 
>do Microsoft employees.  In fact I'd say many Open Source developers are 
>of a far higher standard than those poor dumb bastards who work at Microsoft.

You're oversimplifying things.  There are other aspects to the debate than 
up front cost and openness.  Two crucial issues to the GPL that scares the 
bejeezus out of corporate America are:

1) The License.  Right near the top, it says "NO WARRANTEE".  Now you and I 
know that a better product without a warrantee, and that other people 
depend on and fix then release quickly when a problem arises is MUCH better 
than crappy expensive software with a warrantee that gets fixed whenever 
they get around to it, but corporate decision makers aren't convinced 
yet.  They want someone else to go first.

2) The License: There are frequent references in the GPL to requirements 
that software that uses GPL libraries must be GPL itself, unless the GPL 
license is properly written under the LGPL license or contains certain 
clauses.  For internal corporate development this raises a whole new level 
of importance to license compliance.  Someone has to review which libraries 
are used by internal projects, analyze the licenses and track 
them.  Because in the old commercial system if you make a mistake, you can 
throw money at it and make it go away.  Under GPL, if you make a mistake 
you could end up having your internal projects suddenly having to be 
available to any 3rd party that wants it, if you also made a mistake and 
did something that qualifies it as being 'released'.  Microsoft has called 
the GPL license 'viral', and for once they're right.  With improper use, 
the GPL license will 'infect' other code that uses it.  It is my dream, 
BTW, that one day some GPL code will be found within Windows :')

Rob